Author: Brian

Some say that the USSR fell not because of Ronald Reagan but because at long last the Russian Army had been abused and neglected to such an extent that they no longer would support the Kremlin. (The facts are truly horrid.)

Now that Rumsfeld seems to be rushing into obscurity, not unlike the similar retreat of the Vice President, the recent chief of the British Army is suggesting that their Armed Forces are also treated poorly.

“…wages paid to soldiers were “hardly impressive” and “some accommodation” was “frankly, shaming”.”

…the fundamental ethos of the armed forces, he told his audience: “One’s loyalty must be from the bottom.” link to the BBC

As our troops return to the USA, and they will, and we will win this war, and fools will become quiet, and we will have peace among us, their poverty must not also shame us.

I had written this in gmail:

“I will soon have time to get comfortable with the setup.”

Google shipped this ad:

Big John Toilet Seat Sale
Stylish, comfortable, large custom made toilet seats.

“Any more Christmas spirit and I’ll be shitting jingle bells.
Well, not very often that I do these posts…I dunno, I never did see the point in blogging or keeping a diary for that matter. Not like I’m gonna end up like some Anne Frank.”

…caught on a livejournal link

“The American Mathematical Society is featuring an article with an in-depth explanation of the type of mathematical operations that power PageRank.

Because about 95% of the text on the 25 billion pages indexed by Google consist of the same 10,000 words, determining relevance requires an extremely sophisticated set of methods.

And because the links constituting the web are constantly changing and updating, the relevance of pages needs to be recalculated on a continuous basis.”

More at slashdot…

My comment:
Google likes to see this:

Google’s PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content. In fact, Google feels that the value of its service is largely in its ability to provide unbiased results.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Google is a business. A business listed on the NYSE.
There’s is no such thing as a lack of bias in business.
Thus the NYSE.

But it seems to be true that search engines are changing this year and next. Bravo!

The goal seems to be to remove many of the junk sites, to improve the basic experience for average users — repair the landing page — and of course, to improve the advert spend.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Via pagetoscreen,
There’s 8,000–11,000 new publishing companies are established each year. ISBN.org

But, how much more will author’s earn when product placement in books takes off?
Or has it already, as in blogs?

The richest 2% own more than half of all wealth, according to a new study by a United Nations research institute.

The report, from the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University, says that the poorer half of the world’s population own barely 1% of global wealth.

What is new about this report, the authors say, is its coverage.

It deals with all countries in the world – either actual data or estimates based on statistical analysis – and it deals with wealth, where most previous research has looked at income.

What they mean by wealth in this study is what people own, less what they owe – their debts. The assets include land, buildings, animals and financial assets.

story on the BBC

Update:
Found the study here:
World Institute for Development Economics Research.

Weisheng, a 23 year old guy from Singapore, says,

“Join me in marvelling at the astounding skill of Peter Callesen
in crafting these delicate papercut works of art.”

“It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits – like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing a beautiful woman, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon.

First-rate pursuits – involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding – inevitably result in a sense of failure.

A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is ever unattainable.

Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.”

Malcolm Muggeridge via thenonist

What makes somebody a morning person or a night owl?

The vast majority of people are neither strong morning nor strong evening types — just day types. “Even though somebody will swear he’s a morning person or a night owl, that’s often a false perception,” Brown said. However, 15 to 30 percent of people clearly do not follow the normal 24.1-hour cycle. “Their natural period runs shorter or longer than that, a difference that can change the time they normally fall asleep — and, later, spontaneously awaken — by a couple of hours.”

“For people who are extreme evening types, 1 o’clock in the morning is still an active time. Those individuals also naturally awaken much later in the morning. The great majority of younger college students fall into this category.

“There is a strong genetic component determining whether a person is an evening or a morning type in their activity times,” said Penn State psychology professor Frederick Brown.

[link to story]

A small bird will drop frozen dead

From a bough

Without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D.H. Lawrence

Over the next ten years, Google will move aggressively to index, store and make searchable all of the information in the world. As Google moves our society towards this goal, we will be forced to deal with a new reality – one in which information is ambient, and it is increasingly difficult to hide from your identity or intentions. How will we deal with this change?

Measurements show that 5% of time at the screen is spent in search, 40% is content, 40% is communication. Yet ad revenues are only from search.

The largest part of people’s time is the focus and direction of big web companies.

The future web is more and more “to-do” and “do” delivered through the screen…

I think of it as cubicle mash-up.

I gave her a GameCube last year,
this year she gave me a Virtual Boy.
via Petter Mårtensson, game editor of the Swedish site Kong.

California’s percentage of the total U.S. crop are:

Olives – 100%
Almonds – 99%
Walnuts – 99%
Figs – 98%
Kiwis – 97%
Pistachios – 96%
Apricots – 95%
Celery – 94%
Tomatoes – 94%
Broccoli – 93%
Plums – 93%
Nectarines – 93%
Strawberries 90%
Carrots – 89%
Lemons – 89%
Grapes – 88%
Garlic – 86%
Avocados – 84%
Dates – 82%
Lettuce – 78%
Peaches – 76%
Honeydew – 73%
Asparagus – 55%
Cantaloupe – 54%
Bell Peppers – 47%
Onions – 27%
Cabbage – 22%
Milk & Cream – 21%
Artichokes – 19%
Honey – 18%
Spinach-18%

[hardworkin’ trying out something new Blog of Note link]

Few engineers have taken the time to study art and few artists have spent time programming or conducting usability tests. But times are changing.

Visual designers working on the web need an understanding of the medium in which they work, so many have taken to code. Many have entered the usability lab. But what about the other side?

Are developers and human factors professionals immersed in literature on gestalt and color theory?

Principles of perception:

proximity, similarity, continuance, and closure.

But understanding the psychological manner in which we group visual information is not enough if we want to be able to communicate a specific message. In order to do that, we need to know how to use visual relationships to our advantage —we need to know what makes things different.

Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization

It seems that cancer is not inherited.

Ariel Frailich of Ginseng Press reports:

Science believes that genes play a major role in our health. We believe that, if our parents lived a long life, so will we, and if they had a major illness, we’re bound to get it too. Much research is devoted to finding the genes responsible for all kinds of diseases and conditions as well as ways to manipulate the genes to prevent the disease from being passed on.

Now some doubt has been cast on this theory. While many things are inherited, it seems that there are very few diseases that we’re likely to get just because our parents got them. Cancers, for instance, which are thought to be strongly inherited, turn out not to be.

In a study conducted in 2000 that looked at nearly 45,000 pairs of twins, researchers found only three types of cancer that are likely to occur in both twins. And even for those, the probability was very low: if one twin had the disease, the chances of the other one getting the same cancer was only 15%.

This, and much more, is described in a wonderful article in “The New York Times” (“Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn’t Just in Genes”).

We normally associate leadership with a confident, assertive speaking style.

But according to Alison Fragale at the University of North Carolina, when it comes to tasks or organisations that require a cooperative style of working, people look for leadership from those with doubt and hesitation in their voice.

British Psychological Society Blog

The idea that creative geniuses might not be entirely sane isn’t exactly new. But just how much do creative types have in common with people suffering from psychosis?

A new study shows that poets and artists have as many ‘unusual experiences’ as people with schizophrenia.

What saves them from the disabling effects of schizophrenia is that they don’t suffer from the lack of emotion and motivation – known as ‘introvertive anhedonia’ – also associated with the illness.

More posted at the British Psychological Society Blog

And mathematicians? They reported even fewer unusual experiences than the healthy controls, but that they tended to score highly on lack of emotion and motivation – the opposite pattern to artists and poets.

I heard this:
“There are only a few walking a dog. Keep each.”

I saw this brave site rating, ranking and recommending local home services for Toronto – plumbers, cleaners, roofers — and I wondered what local American neighborhoods would be like in twenty years. Will we flush out the hustlers? Will a new ability to choose top quality and fair prices emerge? If the Yellow Pages could rate a peach…

dead site: www.homestars.ca

Living on their houseboat off the Marin County coast, anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel, concocted a way for the world to communally create a lot of peaceful vibes.

They want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day.

On Dec. 22, they’re asking the world to contribute to the Global Orgasm for Peace. Sheehan said not to worry if you don’t have a partner.

Busy multitaskers shouldn’t despair about trying to cram this global activism into their busy schedules, either, she said. Take any time during the 24-hour period at the beginning of the winter solstice to join the demonstration. Just make sure to think of peace before or after participating.

Once you’ve committed, there’s even a secret sign to show others that you plan to take part: Flash the universal “OK” sign and wink. Or, as it has been redubbed, “The O” sign.

“to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy.” [link to more]

And don’t forget to wink.

via the eclectic drmenlo

Silver in clothing keeps odors away – Associated Press – a silver bullet for keeping the stink out of your socks. Not to mention your underwear, workout clothes, travel outfits, and hiking and hunting gear.

Scranton-based Noble Biomaterials, embeds silver in clothing worn by U.S. soldiers, elite athletes and weekend warriors alike – thus capitalizing on the precious metal’s increasing popularity as a way to keep clothes smelling fresh, even after multiple wears without a wash.

Noble is among a handful of companies that produce silver-coated textiles for use in the burgeoning market for high-tech performance clothing. The 10-year-old, privately held company’s sales have grown an average of 50 percent per year, and doubled in the last 18 months.

Silver kills odor-causing bacteria; it also redistributes body heat, keeping the wearer warm in cold weather and cool in hot weather.

Samsung Electronics Ltd. has launched a line of washing machines and refrigerators that use silver to kill germs. Sharper Image Corp. offers food-storage containers lined with tiny silver particles. Curad sells silver bandages. And Motorola Inc.’s i870 phone includes an anti-bacterial silver coating.

Noble: http://www.noblefiber.com/

Silver Institute: http://www.silverinstitute.org/

Brian Hayes’ weblog, which I’ve entered at left as the one stop thought shop, epitomizes the kind of find that keeps me abuzz. Leafy green aside, this is a meaty endeavor of web-enriching marinated filet d’idee in a delicious gravy of brainwaves.

http://www.drmenlo.com/abuddha/june02.html

The Seventies bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the biggest-selling philosophy book ever.

But for the reclusive author life was bitter-sweet. Here, he talks frankly about anxiety, depression, the death of his son and the road trip that inspired a classic.